Style Guidance Official Blog

YCombinator's Etacts steals Ballpark's layout

So YCombinator’s Etacts just launched today…but wait the site looks familiar.

It looks like they borrowed Ballpark’s layout. Even copied their logo’s font and all the buttons.

If you expect us to trust you with our gmail username and passwords, it’s probably not a good idea to ruin that trust by copying other people’s work.

You are a FUNDED company, amateur stuff like this should never happen.

Take a look for yourself:

New Update

Going to have another update Monday or Tuesday.

Some changes you’ll notice:

• The 2nd ad spot will now show up all the time, for those users with less than 200 reputation.
• Fixed a few badges
• If you have more than 20 rep points, you can post as many Qs/As as you want.
• Relaxed the rules for unregistered users: can create new tags, can vote.
• You won’t see the human verification captcha when you can’t post.

The changes you won’t notice, should help us get more Google traffic.

Month #3 stats

I’m just going to plug in numbers from the old post.

So it’s now been 3 months since I launched Style Guidance.

So here is the report for month #3. I’m comparing December 18th-January 17th numbers to January 18th-February 17th numbers.

• Visitors: 35K —> 64K(up 82%)
• 
• Returning Visitors: 7,491 —> 12,543(up 67%)
• Daily Visitors: 1,200—>1,500K (up 25%)
• Daily Search Engine Traffic: ~550—>~735) (up 33%)
• Contributors(anyone who asked/answered question): 1941—> 2709(up 40%)
• Questions: 1923—> 3111(up 61.2%)
• Twitter Followers: 1466—>2105(up 43.5%)
• Facebook Fans: 915—>1370(up 157%)

We also had a few other milestones, which I want to start tracking for future reports.

• Page Rank: 5(no update yet)
• Alexa Rank Global: 101,789—>76,560

StackOverflow getting VC funding is a recipe for disaster

So we find out today that StackOverflow is going to start looking for VC funding in order to expand the StackOverflow business.

Basically they are going to do a land grab, put out a ton of StackOverflow like sites, and grab the market before it’s too late. So in essence, they are going to do what StackExchange users have been trying to do for like 4 months.

The whole idea here is that they’ll put out a ton of content via Q&A sites and rank well in Google. Pretty much try to duplicate the success they had with StackOverflow.

Now as a SE owner, let me tell you why this will never work.

• community - the only reason StackOverflow grew like it did, was because Joel/Jeff had something like 50,000 fans. You can’t jump start a community. So no VC money will help here.
• lack of focus - if your entire company is focused on one thing, you can do it well; if you don’t have focus, and try to do a dozen sites at the same time, none of them will ever get anywhere. Just look at the trilogy, the sites built after SO’s success aren’t doing as well because they aren’t the true passion, and are just a way to land grab a space:
  • StackOverflow: Alexa 540
  • ServerFault: Alexa 10,485
  • SuperUser: Alexa 13,685
• SEO, StackOverflow ranks well in Google, because there is no real competition in the Programmer Q&A space(forums don’t count). But if you go for anything mainstream, you’ll be crushed by the big HowTo sites or hell even Yahoo Answers. Q&A sites by default suck at getting linked to, that’s why StackOverflow is only a PR6, while eHow is a PR8. An original content site, will almost always outrank Q&A.
• Little mainstream appeal - the StackOverflow design is fine and dandy for the programmer niche. But it is fugly for anything mainstream.
• Answers are a commodity - there are a hundred Q&A sites that have been at it for years, that have all the simple questions answered already(and indexed in Google), the only reason StackOverflow works, is because it was a niche that didn’t have the hard questions answered. There are few niches out there, that have the same parameters, that you see in the programmer niche. And if they do exist(law, finance, medicine), there is no real sense of community like you have with programmers.

Stackoverflow and StackExchange are great platforms. The problem is that they have razor thin margins. It’s not a VC business, it’s a small 2 person team company making enough to pay the bills business.

VC funding makes no sense for a StackOverflow network, they’ll never make enough money to justify the million dollar+ investment. And it’s gotta be a big investment, because these guys have plenty of money to cover the costs otherwise.

Just launch already.

Failure to launch seems to be a disease in the startup community.

Everyone is working on a ton of projects, everyone is plugging away…but noone is launching. Everyone is waiting for perfection.

WHY?!

Do you honestly believe that if you don’t release a perfect product right away, noone will care? Here is a dirty little secret…noone will care even if you do release a perfect product.

Do you believe if you don’t release a perfect product right away, that people are going to hate? Here is another dirty little secret, they’ll hate even if you launch a perfect product.

So just do it already.

There are so many advantages:

• You start aging that domain 6 months early. This leads to more Google traffic earlier, since the big G tends to give bonus points for older sites.
• You build features people want, instead of wasting time building features you think they want. You may think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but in reality that feature, that you spent 2 weeks coding, will only be useful to 2 people.
• You don’t waste your time on useless things.
  
  • Scaling - why waste time optimizing for a ton of traffic when you are getting 10 hits a day? Trust me, even if you hit traffic issues, you aren’t going to lose many users, they’ll just come back the next day.
  • Security - why waste time coding security features? Noone is going to hack a site that gets 10 hits a day. A good example here, is antileet on HN. He wrote an app like Omegle, then started fixing security holes and doing spam protection….a week later Omegle launched and took his cake. If he didn’t bother wasting time on security and spam protection, he might have been in Omegle’s shoes right now.
  • Design - no matter how nice design you make…that first one will be shit compared to your other ones. So why exactly are you spending months designing something, which will not even exist 3 months later?
• You start growing your community right away. Early community building is the hardest part…so why not get a 3-4 month head start?
• There are no more excuses. We’ve all been there, “oh we gotta finish this feature”, “oh we gotta wait till May…since statistically startups that launch in May have a bigger chance of succeeding”, “oh I gotta go save up a little bit more, so that I’ll have $$$ to pay for the 5 million users we are going to get in the first week”. No, you’ve launched, and now it’s time to get your hands dirty.
• You actually see if you are doing something productive, or if you are wasting your time.

Now, I’m not saying you do the whole press thing at this stage. No…what I’m saying is you gotta put your stuff out there, to see what the actual users think. Call it an open alpha…where you build up the product in front of a live audience.

I know you stick to programming since it’s what you are comfortable with. You are scared of marketing, you are scared of building a community, you are scared of putting yourself out there. But you gotta be willing to step out of your shell, if you want to be successful. Stuff like that only looks scary from a distance, once you go get your feet wet, it’ll only be a matter of days before you get comfortable doing these things.

So just launch already…even if you lose 90% of users who come to your site during the build process…that’s still 10% left over to help you create a product that people actually want.

Why isn't Eric Schmidt following anyone on Google Buzz?

Does he have no friends…or does he and his friends know something that we don’t?

BTW on Twitter, the guy follows 92 people

Google profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/109938146389129062343

Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/ericschmidt

Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?

Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?

Remember Zynga?

• 10/31/2009 Techcrunch started the whole Scamville issue over Zynga’s lead gen business with rebill offers.
• 01/08/2010 Techcrunch awarded the CEO of Zynga, the one they blasted just 2 months before in over a dozen posts with “CEO of the Year” award.

How about DB?

• 02/05/2010 He gets caught posting stories in exchange for compensation, I post that he is the intern in question. And everyone jumps on me for outing him.  Actual quotes:
  
  • Oh come on, he’s a teenager
  • We don’t have to out him, though. Let him privately make amends.
  • He’s 17 years old ffs. This is not appropriate content.
  • Even if he asked for something, he deserves a second chance, considering his age
  • is it really worth harming his image for it?
  • We all make mistakes as a teenager, often involving a lack of ethics.
  • I was never this dumb about stuff like this, but I was just as dumb about other stuff. I’d give him a second chance.
• The actual thread was actually deleted, and I was soft banned or soft-suspended

How about ReadWriteWeb trying to get sock puppets to post links?

• Jacques posts that he got approached by a RWW writer to submit the stuff to HN and?
  
  • the highest voted comment tells him: “This sort of submission doesn’t accomplish anything except starting arguments.”
  • another gem: “What is the big deal here?

Where’s accountability? What is it with the “boys will be boys” mentality?

Hell yeah, it’s worth harming the image over it. If you don’t want to hurt your reputation…how about this…stop doing unethical shit? Simple ain’t it?

Here is a little rule you should learn to follow….if you think you’ll be embarrassed by your behavior getting plastered on the front page of New York Times…don’t fucking do it.

So to get back to the original question…why is the startup culture so eager to defend unethical behavior? It seems like I’m the only one who cares about ethics in the startup culture.

P.S. And before you start, I’ve been on both ends of the equation. I was offered money to promote someone’s product, and I’ve been told to pony up some dough to get a post on another blog. Somehow I didn’t have a problem saying no. You don’t need balls of steel to be able to say no. I guess that’s the difference in how we were raised.

The Techcrunch intern who sold posts is Daniel Brusilovsky

All the evidence you need:

we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs.

http://www.techcrunch.com/author/danielbru/

P.S. it is fully appropriate to make the name public, nobody should ever get a free pass on unethical behavior.

P.P.S. here is my followup post…Why is the startup culture so eager to forgive unethical behavior?

Google's porn problem and how to fix it

Have you used Google Images lately? It’s filled with porn, even for the most innocent of keywords.

Now to be clear, this is me using it with safe search off…but that shouldn’t matter. If I search for a completely innocent key phrase, I shouldn’t be seeing porn on first page of results, regardless of whether or not I have safe search turned on or off.

I’ll give you a few examples(warning all these searches are NSFW):

• green shorts
• red top
• cute girl
• orange pants
• tank top

All of these results end up with porn on the front page of the results. Do you think a 10 year old girl searching for green shorts or a red top, should be seeing any of those images?

So how do you fix it?

Well it’s pretty easy. Just apply safe search to the first 3-4 pages of search results(except for porn searches), regardless of whether or not safe search is on. Anyone who wants to see porn for a term “green shorts” can wait till page 5 to see the nudes. And the rest of people who aren’t looking for porn when looking for green shorts, can avoid seeing porn.

But what about porn related searches? What do you do for all the people searching for porn on Google images? It’s easy, you just create a white list, add 500-1000 porn related keywords(porn, sex, soviet steel production, basically whatever term Google feels is a term that people use to search porn) to it, and then just apply it to search results.

If the search string has any of the white listed keywords, and the person has safe search turned off, you kinda know that they are looking for porn, so you show them the porn they’ve been looking for.

And if it doesn’t, you show the non-porn images that the person is actually expecting to find.

This way people won’t get ambushed by porn when searching for innocent keywords, and the people looking for porn can get their fix.

Now some will say, that if you have safe search off, you shouldn’t worry too much about porn. Yes that is true. But what does it say about Google results if they think the #2 result for “red top” should be a nude photo? When people search for “green shorts” are they looking for porn or are they more likely to be looking for photos of green shorts? When people search for “green shorts” are they looking for porn? or is it more likely that they are looking for photos of green shorts? The concern here is that Google is showing completely irrelevant results for image search, when you have safe search turned off.

Turning off safe search doesn’t mean, I want to see irrelevant results at the front of my search results.

Latest update.

The latest update has just rolled out, here are the changes that were implemented:

• Regular username/password login/registration option was added. As usual you can still use 99% of the features w/o registering, but for those who want to vote, now you can register easily.
• Every registered user can now create new tags
• Every registered/unregistered user can now edit tags
• Every registered/unregistered user can now add comments to questions/answers
• Every registered user can now vote
• You can now add/answer questions in a row. There is still a limit of 3 new questions per hour on new users, but at least now you can do it back to back, instead of waiting 20 minutes.
• Subjective question warning has been removed
• A bunch of background stuff that you won’t notice, but which should make the site perform a little bit faster.